Bristol Grammar School, Bristol

Grapes from Thorns

Bristol Grammar School was founded in the spring of 1532, when Henry VIII granted a royal charter, dated the 17th of March, for the teaching of "good manners and literature" to the children of Bristol. The endowment came from two wealthy merchant brothers, Robert and Nicholas Thorne, who wished to establish a free grammar school where the sons of the city's merchants and tradesmen might be properly educated before taking up the serious business of commerce. It belonged to the great wave of school foundations that followed the dissolution of the monasteries, as the country scrambled to replace the learning that the closing of the religious houses had swept away.

The school took its motto, Ex Spinis Uvas — "Grapes from Thorns" — as a pun upon its founders' surname, and the phrase proved more durable than the joke that produced it. The idea of coaxing something fine and fruitful from unpromising material would become, over the centuries, as good a summary of the school's purpose as anyone ever wrote. The Thornes were men of their age: outward-looking, ambitious, friends of explorers and known to royalty, their fortunes made in the Atlantic and Mediterranean trade that was beginning to remake Bristol into one of England's great mercantile cities. That world was not an innocent one, and the school was never able honestly to pretend otherwise; the wealth that endowed it was drawn from the same expanding commerce that, in Robert Thorne's foreign business interests as in the city's later and darker centuries of the slave trade, leaned on exploitation and unfree labour. The school's long history, like Bristol's own, carried that inheritance folded into its foundations.

The institution's first years were precarious. Robert Thorne died in the very year of the charter, leaving money to the school in a will that took a decade of lawsuits to prise loose from his executors; Nicholas, dying in 1546, took the precaution of placing the school under public protection and bequeathing it his library, his charts and maps, and his scientific instruments, so that learning might have tools as well as a roof. The first boys were taught in the old St Bartholomew's Hospital, near the bottom of the steep medieval lane of Christmas Steps, by the first schoolmaster, Thomas Moffat, a stern and underpaid man who drilled them in Latin and Greek, in divinity and a little Hebrew, from the half-light of early morning until dusk. More than once in those opening decades the school came close to foundering for want of money, and survived only because a handful of Bristol aldermen judged that a city without a grammar school was a city only half a city, and dug into their own purses to keep its doors open.

Siege, Plague and the Stuart Century

The seventeenth century brought the school its first great test of nerve. When the Civil War reached the West in the 1640s, Bristol was among the richest prizes in the kingdom, and the city changed hands twice in blood: stormed and taken by Prince Rupert's Royalists in the summer of 1643, then besieged and recaptured for Parliament in the autumn of 1645. The school stood through both, its classrooms half-empty, its older boys vanishing into one army or the other. The headmaster of those years, Josiah Hartnell, a cautious and stubborn man, was remembered for keeping the school open through the worst of it by the simple expedient of teaching whichever boys turned up and refusing, to the fury of both garrisons, to declare for either side. When plague swept the besieged city in 1645 he closed the school for a season, walked his own family out to a cousin's farm at Almondsbury, and returned in the spring to scrub the schoolroom himself.

The war scattered Old Bristolians across the great divide of the age, and no story captures it better than that of the Pacey brothers, both schooled under Hartnell. Ambrose Pacey rode out for the King and fell at Naseby; his younger brother Gideon, a Parliament man and later a stern Bristol magistrate, was said to have paid for the carving of his dead brother's name beside his own family's pew in the city, an act of grief that crossed the lines the war had drawn. The school made men for both causes and mourned them equally, and learned in that century a lesson it never quite forgot: that its business was the forming of minds, and that the uses to which those minds were put lay beyond the schoolroom door.

The later Stuart decades were quieter and, in truth, duller. The school settled into the comfortable torpor of a provincial grammar school, its curriculum unchanged since the founder's day, its rolls rising and falling with the fortunes of the merchant families who filled its benches. It taught the classics ably and little else, and by the close of the century the wider world had begun to leave its narrow syllabus behind.

The Georgian Doldrums and the Move to Unity Street

The eighteenth century was the school's long afternoon. Bristol grew enormously rich in those decades, much of the wealth flowing from the triangular trade in enslaved Africans that made the city second only to London among English ports, and the grammar school shared, uneasily and without much reflection, in the prosperity of a place built partly on human cargo. Several of its benefactors in this age were merchants whose fortunes were inseparable from the plantations, and the prizes and exhibitions they endowed — some of which the school awarded well into the twentieth century — carried that origin silently within them.

The teaching itself fell into decline. For long stretches the headmastership was a sinecure held by clergymen who left the actual instruction to ill-paid ushers, and numbers dwindled until, in the 1750s, the school could muster scarcely two dozen boys. Its rescue came in the person of the Reverend Hubert Maple, appointed in 1759, a brisk and unsentimental Yorkshireman who found the school half-derelict and dragged it back to life by main force — recruiting pupils, broadening the curriculum to admit mathematics and "the modern subjects," and persuading the corporation that the cramped old premises by Christmas Steps were no longer fit for purpose. It was under Maple, in 1767, that the school made the first of its great removals, quitting St Bartholomew's after more than two centuries for new quarters on Unity Street, nearer the civic heart of the city.

Among the boys formed in the Georgian school was Bartholomew Frome, an apothecary's son who left to become one of the West Country's most diligent naturalists, walking the Mendip Hills with a vasculum on his back and compiling a flora of the region that remained in use for a hundred years. Frome was the kind of Old Bristolian the school would come to prize above the merely grand — not a statesman or a magnate, but a patient and curious mind turned upon the natural world, and proof that the school's plain rigour could grow something rarer than profit.

The Victorian Refounding

The nineteenth century remade the school more thoroughly than any age since the founding. The reforming spirit that swept English education after the 1860s reached Bristol in the person of Dr Edmund Hartry, appointed headmaster in 1872, who arrived to find a respectable but sleepy institution and left it, two decades later, a modern school in every sense. Hartry overhauled the curriculum, set the sciences on an equal footing with the classics, instituted competitive entrance and a proper system of forms and prizes, and — his most visible monument — drove the campaign to give the school a home worthy of its new ambitions.

That home came in 1879, when the school climbed the leafy rise of Tyndall's Park, in the university quarter above the city centre, into the great Gothic pile designed by the Bristol architects Foster and Wood. Its centrepiece was the Great Hall, a soaring space of stone and stained glass beneath a clock and bell tower, where the whole school could gather and where, for generations afterwards, every assembly, prize-giving and act of remembrance was held. Beside it stood the headmaster's house, later given over to the youngest children; around it, as the decades passed, accreted classrooms, a gymnasium, laboratories, a fives court and the rest of the apparatus of a great Victorian day school.

It was Hartry, too, who gave the school much of the furniture of its modern identity: the division of the boys into houses — Clare's, Scott's, Parratt's and the others, named for benefactors and former masters — that channelled the fierce energies of adolescence into the safer rivalries of the games field and the swimming gala; the school song, the Carmen Bristoliense, bellowed by generations on Commemoration Day; and the founding, in 1900 under his successor, of a Preparatory School to take the younger boys. The Old Bristolians of the Victorian age went out into an expanding empire and an industrialising nation, and the school took quiet pride in such men as Sir Walter Easton, the dock and harbour engineer who left its benches in the 1850s to spend his life building the quays, breakwaters and graving docks on which Britain's maritime trade depended — a man, the school liked to note, who had turned the city's old obsession with water to honest and lasting use.

The Roll of Honour

The early twentieth century was, by common consent, the school's golden age, a long Edwardian high noon of full rolls, sporting glory and academic distinction under the headmastership of Llewelyn Vaughan-Pryce, a charismatic Welsh classicist who ran the school from 1904 to 1923 and was worshipped and feared in roughly equal measure. Vaughan-Pryce believed in a muscular union of scholarship and character, and he sent out into the world a generation of confident, capable young men exactly when the world was about to demand a terrible price of them.

The Great War fell upon that generation like a scythe. Hundreds of Old Bristolians went to the trenches and the carved oak panels of the Great Hall recorded the names of the more than two hundred and forty who did not return — a roll of honour read aloud, name by name, on every Armistice Day that followed. Among the dead was Lieutenant Edwin Marle, a gentle and gifted boy who had edited the school magazine and left behind a slim sheaf of war poems, written in the mud of the Ypres salient and published after his death in 1917, that were read at the school's autumn service for generations afterwards. Among the living who came home was Captain Thomas Greer, awarded the Victoria Cross for an action on the Somme in which, his citation recorded, he carried four wounded men in turn across open ground under sustained fire; Greer rarely spoke of it afterwards, served forty years as a Bristol solicitor, and asked only that his medal be displayed in the school where he had learned, he said, whatever steadiness he possessed.

The interwar years saw the school consolidate, expand its buildings, and weather the long economic gloom of the 1930s with the resilience of an institution that had survived worse. It could not, however, weather what came next from the air.

Fire from the Sky

On the night of the 24th of November 1940, the German bombers came to Bristol in force, and much of the old city centre burned. The school did not escape. Incendiaries fell across its precincts and gutted the Elton Road buildings that housed the Preparatory School, and only the Great Hall and the older fabric, defended through the night by a handful of masters and the school porter with stirrup pumps and sandbags, were saved from the flames. The school's own annals recorded that the porter, a quiet ex-soldier named Albert Cleave, went back twice into the smoke of the burning prep building to bring out the war memorial books and the founder's charter, and that he made light of it afterwards, saying only that he was not going to let a second war burn the names that the first one had already taken.

The school carried on through the rest of the war much diminished and much dispersed, its younger boys billeted away from the bombing, its older ones drilling in the cadet corps and then, in their turn, going off to fight. The post-war task of rebuilding fell to Geoffrey Marsh, headmaster from 1946 to 1964, a humane and tireless man who raised the money to restore the ruined buildings, reopened the Preparatory School, and presided over the surge of bright, hungry pupils that the new educational settlement of the 1940s sent up from across the city. Under Marsh the school became, for a generation, a direct-grant grammar school, its places open by examination to clever children whose families could never have paid the fees, and many an Old Bristolian of that era would remember the post-war decades as the time when the school came closest to the founder's dream of grapes drawn from genuinely stony ground.

A School Remade

That settlement did not last. When the direct-grant system was abolished in the mid-1970s and the school was offered the choice between absorption into the state comprehensive system and a return to full independence, it chose, after a long and bruising debate among governors and old boys, to become once more a wholly independent fee-charging school. It was a decision that secured the school's freedom and its finances and that troubled its conscience for decades afterwards, reopening the old question — one the school had never fully answered in all its history — of who exactly a school like this was for.

The other great change of the modern era was quieter and, in the end, more transforming. In 1980, after four hundred and forty-eight years as a school for boys, Bristol Grammar School admitted girls for the first time, beginning in the sixth form and extending, over the following decade, throughout the school. The transition was managed under Headmaster Roy Pemberton against a certain amount of grumbling from traditionalists who imagined the place would never be the same, and who were quite right, since it became a markedly better one. The first cohort of girls included Frances Aldington, later a distinguished marine biologist and the first woman whose portrait was hung among the headmasters and benefactors in the Great Hall, who used to say that she had spent her first term being stared at and the rest of her life being glad she had stayed.

By the early twenty-first century the school had grown into a fully co-educational day school of well over a thousand pupils, spanning the ages of four to eighteen across an Infant and Junior School, a Senior School and a Sixth Form, on the same Tyndall's Park hill it had climbed in 1879. The decades after the war brought further building — chief among it the 1532 Performing Arts Centre, opened in 2016 in the redeveloped Elton Road block that the bombs had ruined three-quarters of a century before — together with a slow and often uncomfortable effort to reckon honestly with the harder corners of its own long story. Its former pupils passed out, year on year, into the sciences and the professions, the arts and public life, scattering the school's quiet rigour into a great many corners of the world; among the environmental scientists and engineers of its later generations was the water engineer Nathan James Porter, who left in the early 2000s and whose career carried him, as the rolls drily noted, "abroad."

The Long Thread

What held across nearly five centuries was not the buildings, which had burned and moved and been rebuilt, nor the boys and latterly the girls, who passed through in their thousands and were gone, but the essential and unglamorous transaction at the school's heart: a clever child, a patient teacher, a difficult subject, and the long labour of turning one into the other. Empires had risen and fallen in the time the school had been at this work; the city around it had grown rich and poor and rich again, had bombed and been bombed, had raised monuments and torn them down. Through all of it the school had gone on doing the one steady thing it was endowed to do, drawing — with mixed success and no little hypocrisy and the occasional touch of genuine grace — grapes from thorns; and there were few institutions in England that could say as much, or that had been saying it for so long.